I've been working on improving a few aspects of M-theory, and I've made enough headway with them that I thought I'd let you all know what I'm up to. So far, here's what I've got in the works:

[edit: list updated 2/28]

Two new arp speeds
- These provide kind of an offset/odd timed speed.

Arp pattern (clock gate) sequencer length adjustment
- This will allow you to set how many steps the clock gate sequencer has, ranging from 1 to 16. This can be useful for odd time signatures. It still needs more testing, but so far it seems to be working well.

Arp bypass option when latched
When a latch button is turned on, a new button will appear next to it that lets you bypass the arp.

- If just one arp is in use, the bypass sends the notes back out to the synth, letting you keep the arp running underneath while you play freely over top.

- If both arps are in use and both bypasses are activated, both arps keep running while you play freely over top.

- If both arps are in use and one only bypass is activated, the bypassed arp signal goes nowhere, letting you play the other arp without excess/doubled notes.

- The latch bypasses are accessable via VST automation and MIDI CC, so they can be sequenced or used live from a controller.

This new bypass feature should be especially handy for people who play/record live (rather than step sequence) since it lets you jam over top of an arp pattern without your having to load another instance of the plugin to do it.

Sound quality modes
- This will let you switch between a high and low quality mode. High quality is what it is now, and the low quality mode provides a softer tone which can save some cpu. Basically, what it does is just removes a whole bunch of tonal enhancements from various points in the signal chain. The softer tone definitely can have its uses, but the main reason for it is just in case you really need to shave off a few % from the cpu hit. This setting will be global and will not be saved with presets. This will let you set it once and flip through presets without having to keep changing it. The setting will be saved with your songs though.

Other tweaks, fixes, and slight improvement in clarity

- Fixed missing automation for the VA exciter pitch controls
- Changed the name of the arp hold to "latch"

I've made a few other minor internal improvements here and there. Most of them you may not see the difference in, but they help a few features run just a tiny bit more efficiently. However, one of those changes resulted in the the tone being a little bit brighter, clearer, and a little better defined. I had not expected it, but that does seem to be the case when comparing against 1.0.

1.0 Preset compatibility
1.0 presets will still be compatible with this update, however when loading your own presets (or songs made with 1.0) you will likely get an error message saying something to the effect that data was not found for all parameters. This is only because old presets did not have data for new controls. The presets will still load fine though and you just have to resave them to get rid of that warning message. The banks that come with M-theory will already be updated. The manual will also be updated for these new features.

Since I am working on this update, does anyone have any requests or suggestions for additional changes? If so, let me know. If I like the suggestion, and if its possible to include it within my time frame for this update, then I'll see if I can add it.
Last edited by ugo on Thu Feb 28, 2008 8:24 am; edited 1 time in total

The arp thing is certainly the one I'd have asked for.
\
I won't make any suggestions because I'm sure they wouldn't be "representative" of the user base, but I look forward to this

Feel free to suggest whatever you wish. Or if you prefer, you can of course PM me about it. If I like the idea too then I may add it. Thats how the clock sequencer step adjustment came about, it was a request from a user.

Maybe it's just me, but I've always liked your stuff the way it is. It never occurred to me that anything was wrong until you brought it up.

I really like M-Theory and find it quite inspirational. Looking forward to the update.

Cheers
-B

Ok, I can do that.

More improvements/changes for 1.1 (provided the plans don't get derailed by bugs that I haven't discovered yet):

- Fixed missing automation for the VA exciter pitch controls
- Changed the name of the arp hold to "latch"

More new arp functionality:

When a latch button is turned on, a new button appears next to it that lets you bypass the arp.

- If just one arp is in use, the bypass sends the notes back out to the synth, letting you keep the arp running underneath while you play freely over top.

- If both arps are in use and both bypasses are activated, both arps keep running while you play freely over top.

- If both arps are in use and one only bypass is activated, the bypassed arp signal goes nowhere, letting you play the other arp without excess/doubled notes.

- The latch bypasses are accessable via VST automation and MIDI CC, so they can be sequenced or used live from a controller.

This new bypass feature should be especially handy for people who play/record live (rather than step sequence) since it lets you jam over top of an arp pattern without your having to load another instance of the plugin to do it.

By the way, this feature is thanks to another request by the same user who suggested the arp sequencer length reduction and the addition of off-time speed modes.

The dual arp in 1.0 is already grrreat, and with all these enhancements... any chance that M-Theory gets midi output? Or better yet, any chance to provide the dual arp alone as a complementary midi plugin, just like Tunguska complements Ironhead? It's so good that I find myself wanting to use it on all kinds of things, not only on M-Theory itself (which btw rocks!).

Another thing that comes to mind: allow more parameters to be modulated by note velocity for even more organic performances. Particularly some key synthesis parameters such as noise level, damping, pre-attack/attack/decay/release, fm or detune.
I understand that this might be tricky to implement in the current gui and thus out of reach for this update, but I thought I'd mention it anyway... maybe for a future 2.0?
Last edited by Juanjo on Thu Feb 28, 2008 1:17 pm; edited 1 time in total

And yet another thing (sorry for the avalanche!): a way to increase polyphony, either within the plugin or as a separate dll with, say, 8 or even 16 voices. This might be particularly useful after 1.1, with the new bypass functionality in the arps you might run out of voices pretty fast...
OK, I'll stop here

Between the two, I think I'd rather go for the separate MIDI plugin, since it would be more cpu efficient. I've actually been thinking about perhaps doing this but that but haven't tried making it yet. I'll give it a try and see how it goes.



That may need to be part of a larger future update, but I'll look into it and see if I can squeeze in a few other modulation options.

I can say already though that the damping modulation probably won't make this update. The module I am using for that goes out of tune when damping is applied. I have compensated for that in the presets I offer but I have not yet come up with a 100% effective method of having the parameter freely adjustable. I will continue to work on that though because I really would like to offer modulation for that one day.



I am not currently aware of any good ways to offer adjustment of polyphony in SE (though it's always possible that I may have missed a module that offers this.) I'd rather not release a separate dll for this either since I'd prefer to only have to worry about maintaining a single dll.

Of course the more voices you add, the more cpu it will eat up. M-theory is already very hungry at 6 voices. 16 would probably be completely unusable for most people.

By the way, speaking of 6 voices...if you have a MIDI guitar or a Yamaha EZ-G, give it a try with M-theory. I've had fun using my EZ-AG with it.

Fair enough, and actually this is suddenly less important to me, as I just figured out (yeah I'm slow ) that I can use the wonderful InsertPizHere midi plugs to generate a new velocity-generated or totally random CC value (with midiNotesToCC and midiSimpleLFO respectively) each time a note is pressed, and it works like a charm with M-Theory



Again fair enough and I might be confusing SE with SM, because some SM plugs definitely provide a polyphony control but come to think of it I don't recall seeing any SE ones that do (edit: definitely not possible as of now but I just read that changing polyphony dinamically might be a possibility in SE 1.1).
If anything then, maybe increasing to 8 voices to accomodate the 2 "lost" when both arps are bypassed in 1.1? Just a thought anyway, it's no big deal.

True, increasing the polyphony to 8 or 10 probably would be helpful since that would allow you a bit more room to play over top. However, increasing the overall polyphony will increase the cpu load in many playing situations because the synth will have the ability to overlap that many more voices (due to envelope release times, etc.) I'll run some experiments and see how I feel about the increased cpu vs playability with the new arp bypass.

Looks like I've got a working prototype for a VST effect version of the arps. I've included the 2X in there as well. It will receive on any channel and you have the option of choosing your MIDI output channel (for use with multi timbral synths.) SE does not seem to offer the option of outputting the mfx format so I will be saving this as a VST effect. This means that for it to be useful to you, your host will need to support the sending and receiving of MIDI note data to and from a VST effect.

No doubt I need to spend more time testing and tweaking, but so far I seem to be successfully using it to arpeggiate other synths in Cubase. I also was able to use it to arpeggiate a hardware synth with no problem.

Being that it will be a bonus add-on to M-theory (free to all M-theory owners, of course), I'm going to keep the GUI in the same style and may even use the exact same layout, since I think the layout is comfortable use and that will help it retain a consistent feel with M-theory. However, being that it will be a plugin unto itself, it will need a name. I have a few ideas in mind (most are kinda silly, though fun) but I am certainly open to suggestions. Any ideas?

- "Membrane", "M-Brane" or "Brane" (as the building block or "atom" of the actual scientific theory... also brane sounds like brain).

- Geometry (as the basic mathematical tool needed to define the actual scientific theory).

I'll get my coat.

Thanks for the suggestions. I think a variation on brane would probably work better for a drum synth. (Which makes me wonder why I didn't use it for Ironhead.) Geometry is pretty good too, but it is bringing other types of products to my mind. (And I'll have to keep it in mind because of that.) Both are certain better than anything I was kicking around though.

However, I was just emailed a name that I think fits perfectly: Dualism. Considering the plugin consists of two parts, a dual arp and the 2x doubler/retrigger, I think that fits very well. I've looked around a bit and haven't seen any other plugins using it yet. Anyone know of a plug that already has this name? If not, then I think this plug has found a name.